Ry4an's Unblog

I think in a monospaced font.

I've had a resume in active maintenance since the mid 90s, and it's gone through
many iterations. I started with a Word document (I didn't know any better). In
the late 90s I moved to parallel Word, text, and HTML versions, all maintained
separately, which drifted out of sync horribly. In 2010 I redid it in Google
Docs using a template I found whose HTML hinted at a previous life in Word for
OS X. That template had all sorts of class and style stuff in it that Google
Docs couldn't actually edit/create, so I was back to hand-editing HTML and then
using Google Docs to create a PDF version. I still had to keep the text version
current separately, but at least I'd decided I didn't want any job that wanted a
Word version.

When I decided to finally add my current job to my resume, even months after
starting, I went for another overhaul. The goal was to have a single input file
whose output provided HTML, text, and PDF representations. As I saw it that
made the options: LaTeX, reStructuredText, or HTML.

I started down the road with LaTeX, and found somegreattemplates,
articles, andpriorexamples, but it felt like I was fighting with the tool
to get acceptable output, and nothing was coming together on the plain text
renderer front.

Next I turned to reStructuredText, and found it yielded a workable system. I
started with Guillaume ChéreAu's blog post and template and used the regular
docutils tool rst2html to generate the HTML versions. The normal route for
turning reStructuredText into PDF using doctools passes through LaTeX, but I
didn't want to go that route, so I used rst2pdf, which gets there directly. I
counted the reStructuredText version as close-enough to text for that format.

Since now I was dealing entirely with a source file that compiled to generated
outputs it only made sense to use a Makefile and keep everything in a
Mercurial repository. That gives me the ability to easily track changes and
to merge across multiple versions (different objectives) should the need arise.
With the Makefile and Mercurial in place I was able to add an automated version
string/link to the resume so I can tell from a print out which version someone
lis looking at. Since I've always used a source control repository for the HTML
version it's possible to compare revisions back to 2001, which get pretty silly.

I'm also proud to say that the URL for my resume hasn't changed since 1996, so
any printed version ever includes a link to the most current one. Here are
links to each of those formats: HTML, PDF, text, and repository, where the
text version is the one from which the others are created.